Europe’s Kosovo policy is unspeakably vile. But more than that, at this point it doesn’t even benefit them. At this point, the European governments are so intent on humiliating Serbia (and Serbia’s allies in the UN) that they have voluntarily created a threat to their own national security.
Europeans complain about how Muslims are allegedly trying to take over their countries and expanding Islam into Europe. But then again, by assaulting Serbia and stealing Serbia’s historic heartland, those same Europeans destroyed an old, European, Christian society, and gave the land over to…a band of Islamic extremists who have used the NATO occupation as a cover for their ethnic cleansing of the Serbian population of Kosovo.
After NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999, Kosovo became a legal black hole, unaccountable to anyone. It is now a haven for drug trafficking, organised crime, and Islamic extremism. (Some of the 9/11 hijackers had trained in the Muslim regions of the Balkans.) NATO and the EU are both unable and unwilling to control these activities. And it’s not like the KLA is going to be satisfied with just this. They also claim Macedonia, Montenegro, and parts of Greece as “Greater Albania,” and fully intend to annex more land in the future.
Not only that, but this opens up the door for any dissatisfied ethnicity anywhere to demand independence and refuse to compromise. This includes the Basques in Spain, Hungarians in Romania, Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, Muslims in Russia, Russians in all of the former Soviet republics, the Scots in the UK, and so on. Some of these situations could result in new wars. The EU’s response is to bleat some bureaucratic nonsense about how the Kosovo situation is “unique” and thus only Kosovo Muslims deserve independence – while areas of Kosovo that still have a Serb majority do not have the right to stay with Serbia! No one will ever take this ridiculous argument seriously.
As with the war in Iraq, the Kosovo war was based on many lies. Clinton, Blair et al. viciously demonised the Serbs and blamed them for all the atrocities committed in the Balkans over the previous decade. They turned public opinion in favour of the war by fabricating a “genocide” that the Serbs supposedly committed. First they claimed that 100,000 or even 500,000 Albanians were killed in the “genocide” – then, as time passed, they revised that figure to 50,000, then 10,000, and then, after the war, they just stopped talking about numbers altogether. (The actual number of bodies recovered from Kosovo has been on the order of two thousand, of whom many were Serbs.) At the same time, NATO deliberately targeted Serbian civilian infrastructure, and used weapons containing depleted uranium against the Serbs.
In reality, the Balkans were embroiled in a <i>civil war</i>, in which all the sides were equally determined and ruthless, and committed equally many atrocities. But <i>after</i> the war – oh yes, then the ethnic cleansing began in earnest, except now the Serbs were its victims. As recently as 2004, Kosovo was swept by violence in which hundreds of Serbs were either killed or driven from their homes, to say nothing of the Serbian cultural artefacts (e.g. monasteries) that were destroyed in the process. The EU’s answer is to <i>deny them any legal recourse whatsoever</i>.
Unsurprisingly, despite all its well-funded bureaucratic and legal structures, the “international court” failed to convict Milosevic, despite having years to do. Milosevic capably discredited most of the prosecution’s claims and witnesses – so they tried to restrict his legal rights by forcing him to accept one of their own lawyers as legal counsel, and then when that didn’t work, they just postponed the trial and waited for him to die from his health problems. Milosevic may have committed many war crimes, but if he deserved to stand trial, then so did all of his opponents in the war, as well as all of his judges. The court was a travesty of justice, and quickly turned into a pointless, self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine.
Neither Europe nor America really cares about Kosovo. They just want to wrap it up quickly and hope that the problem goes away. That doesn’t happen in the Balkans. This kind of policy will lead to some very troubling times, and the EU will have no one to blame but itself.